... The resolution of the antagonism between ego and environment consists in adaptation.... Either the ego adapts itself to the environment through certain changes or actions or it is able to shape certain parts of the environment in such a manner that they are adapted to its own purposes or, finally, some mutual adaptation takes place.... This is not to say that every change or movement of the organism called forth by external stimuli is or must be appropriate. Many can be quite indifferent and some even inappropriate. But only those organisms will develop and maintain themselves whose appropriate reactions to external stimuli preponderate over the inappropriate ones. The appearance of consciousness, of the awareness of the environment and of the organism's own needs and capacities serves to make it easier for the reaction to external stimuli to occur in an appropriate manner.

The process of movement and development in the organic world outlined here is a dialectical process, that is, it is a process that begins with an affirmation, is continued by a negation, and is concluded by a negation of the negation, that is, an affirmation. It was in this sense that Hegel used the word, and Marx and Engels took it over from him. The starting point of each process of adaptation is an organism, the ego, the affirmation, the "thesis." It is opposed by its environment, the "non-ego," the negation of the organism, the "antithesis." The final result is the overcoming of the opposition, the negation of the negation, the renewed affirmation of the organism through adaptation, the "synthesis." Thereby the process returns to its starting point, the individual that maintains itself. It may have changed in the course of the process in such a way that the starting point is raised to a higher level. In that case, what occurs is not a circular movement but development.

It seems very doubtful to me that the movement of the entire world, the inorganic as well as the organic, fits into this scheme. To be sure, in the inorganic world, too, every new movement arises out of the antagonism or collision of opposed elements. However, the result ... is not always a synthesis and certainly not a return to the starting point.

CHAPTER TWO
The Dialectic of Self-Initiated Development

The dialectic described here agrees with the Hegelian one in form but is of an entirely different kind. For Hegel, thesis and antithesis are not, as are organism and environment, two quite different things affecting each other, but the thesis already contains its own contradiction, its negation. This negation grows and finally overcomes and transcends the thesis, the starting point of the process. But the negation, too, contains the seed of its own negation, which finally leads to the synthesis and the renewed affirmation of the thesis but on a higher level. Marx and Engels took over this conception of the dialectic from Hegel, but, as Engels put it in his essay on Feuerbach, they "turned [it] off its head ... and placed [it] upon its feet again. " To Hegel, the dialectic was a movement of the mind [or spirit] produced by the mind itself that sets the world in motion and effects historical development. Marx and Engels "materialised" it, they turned it into a law of motion of the material world as well as of thought.

[Kautsky here quotes Engels' Anti-Dühring, and comments:] In this description, the conception of the negation is particularly striking. The germinating of the seed and the growth of the animal out of the egg are conceived of as negations of the seed and the egg.... [But] every organism passes through a number of stages in the course of its existence and its forms change incessantly. If giving up its past form and assuming a new one constitutes a negation of the earlier form, then the individual is engaged in a continuous process of negation.... Even more questionable than the conception of the negation is that of the negation of the negation. Here a real negation of the individual is being referred to. The plant dies after it has borne seeds, the butterfly dies after it has laid its eggs. The newly produced seed or the newly laid egg constitutes the return to the starting point of the process, the seed or the egg, from which the individual had originated. But the production of seeds and eggs and the death of the organism that produced them by no means coincide temporally. The former always occurs earlier than the latter. The negation of the negation and the synthesis, the return to the thesis, are then, by no means identical, although they may follow one another in quick succession in the case of some organisms....

... Here we investigate the question whether the processes of movement and development in the world really always assume the form of the Hegelian dialectic-thesis, antithesis, synthesis with return to the starting point. I consider this assumption to be correct for the organic world, but not at all in the way Engels illustrates it here. He regards movement and development not as the reciprocal effect of two factors, the individual and the environment, on one another but merely as the self-initiated movement of one factor, the individual, and he seeks the antithesis as well as the thesis in the same individual. Evidently, this is still a strong after-effect of the Hegelian model, which also explained movement in terms of only one factor, the mind, positing, out of itself, its own negation.

As a scheme to characterise some processes, but not as a general law, the dialectical negation of the negation in the Hegelian sense can, under certain circumstances, be quite appropriate. I have myself repeatedly applied it in this way but have become very cautious in doing so, because it is easily subject to a certain arbitrariness....

With respect to the Hegelian scheme of the dialectic as the necessary form of the movement and development of all phenomena in the world, there arise grave doubts particularly after it has been subject to materialist "inversion." But it is by no means settled that Marx and Engels regarded this scheme as a general, necessary law of motion of the world. [There follow two more quotations from Engels' Anti-Dühring, from which Kautsky concludes:] That is to say, we need not at all to accept the dialectic everywhere a priori as the necessary scheme of development; rather, we must discover it where it does occur.... It became very fruitful for the Marxian conception of history, which by no means submitted to it slavishly....

[Marx and Engels] were at pains to approach nature and history "free from preconceived idealist crotchets" [Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach]. The Hegelian dialectic therefore never seduced them to indulge in forced constructions and never misled them to substitute for research the invention, with the aid of the Hegelian "idealist crotchet," of imaginary interrelationships. The [dialectic] served them merely to direct their attention to the contradictions and conflicts of society, which work toward new "syntheses," and to facilitate their investigation. The Hegelian dialectic was for them merely a "heuristic principle," not absolute truth.... They regarded it not as a routine to be followed mechanically that made all further research unnecessary, but as one of the lights that illuminate the path of research.

CHAPTER THREE
The Dialectic of Perfection

In Engels' illustrations of the dialectic, we find, aside from self-movement, an element of an idealist rather than materialist nature, that of the steady perfection of the world through the dialectical process.... In the above-mentioned illustrations of the dialectic Engels points out, still without qualification, that it always means a further development of the organism due to its inherent nature, a development he even designated as perfection. [Kautsky then objects to Engels' identification of a quantitative increase as perfection, as in his example of a plant that grew out of a single seed producing many seeds, and especially to Engels' citing improvements in plants artificially produced by gardeners to meet human tastes or needs as an illustration of perfection in nature.]

Hegel could discover in the world steady progress toward growing perfection, because he saw a world-reason at work in it setting purposes. But where can materialist thinking find a world-purpose? And if there is none, what is the origin of the striving for steady perfection through the dialectical process? Man can set purposes for himself in nature and can adapt particular phenomena of his environment to his purposes, and he can see this as perfection from his point of view. But it would be anthropocentric thinking to regard this as perfection of the world. . . . In nature there is, certainly, constant development, but this is not synonymous with perfection or even always with upward development....

Perfection is basically nothing other than appropriateness to a purpose. ... Every organism has its own purposes, which in the last analysis can be traced back to the purpose of its preservation and reproduction. In this sense, an organism will be all the more perfect, the better it is adapted to this purpose of self-preservation of the individual and of the species. Now, it is impossible to say that this adaptation and perfection grow in the course of the evolution of organisms, that the more highly developed ones ... are better adapted and more capable of living and of maintaining themselves than those more simply constructed.... One cannot possibly say that the human species is better adapted for its preservation than the species of earthworms. It is, therefore, not correct that the process of development always means an advancement to ever-greater perfection.

And likewise one cannot say that the negation of the negation in the Hegelian sense always leads back to the starting point-on a higher level, to be sure - of the dialectical process. In society, it is true, every change of a social institution amounts to its negation.... But ... there are institutions to which men never return after they have once gone beyond them.... And the same is true of the development that the individual plant or animal organism goes through from the moment of its conception to its demise. Even if one chooses to call each of the stages of this development a negation of the preceding ones, nowhere in it can a return to an earlier stage be discovered....

It is evident that the Hegelian dialectical scheme is not generally, but often only in a very forced manner and frequently not at all, applicable to nature and society if one simply "inverts" it. For its materialist application, it is not enough merely to turn it off its head and place it upon its feet, but one must also completely change the path which the feet follow. We achieve agreement of the thought with the facts only if we seek what is dialectical in the scheme, not in the direction of the development, but in the motive-force of the development of organisms and regard as such the dialectical reaction of the individual organism to its environment.... 9

CHAPTER FOUR
The Conservative Nature of the Mind

.... Although in a different sense than Hegel, we regard the dialectical process primarily as a mental one, as the struggle of an aware and consciously acting being with its environment. At least only this kind of dialectical process need concern us here, where we are dealing with the materialist conception of history.

The mind is a very highly active, restless element, but no change of direction, no new goal or ideal, no new thought or new knowledge, arises in it without a cause ... without an impulse from without. Because the environment is constantly undergoing change and unceasingly presents us with problems we must solve if we want to maintain ourselves, for that reason the mind is in continuous, restless movement.... The active nature of our mind does not, however, go so far that it spontaneously engenders problems that the external world does not offer it.... If it has found a solution of a problem, then it remains faithful to it.... as long as no new facts turn up that cause it to appear as mistaken or at least as inadequate. Most of the problems that everyday life poses for us recur anew in the same way again and again.... Under constant conditions, the same solution is found again and again for such problems. This solution becomes a habit that one accepts from one's ancestors and considers, without further reflection, as self-evident. Man passionately resists any modification of it as a violation of his essential being. Very compelling new facts must turn up that are incompatible with the old ideas before these are abandoned.... The human mind, or rather the mind of animals generally, does not hanker after innovations but is conservative....

Every change in the relationship of man to the external world creates new problems. Such changes are effected not only through a change in the external world, but also through a change in the animal or human organism itself... However, these changes in the organism are of two kinds. Either they occur necessarily in certain phases in the course of every normal individual of the same species. Then the problems that arise from [these changes] are new for the individual but not for the species.... Or it is a matter of phenomena that are peculiar not to the species, but only to particular individuals. Such phenomena, like sicknesses, can represent new phenomena and call forth new problems that require new solutions. Such changes ... will, however, as a rule, be traceable in the last analysis to particular influences of the external world on the individual or its ancestors.

Problems always arise for the individual from the relationship between its innate character and the external world, and new problems arise only from a modification of this relationship, never from a change of the mind coming out of itself. There are no innovations without the mind. Without new ideas there is no new conscious practice. But the impetus to the new ideas, if they are new not merely for the individual but for the species, is given by the external world.". . . The mind becomes revolutionary only where its environment has already been revolutionised.

CHAPTER FIVE
The Adaptation of Thoughts to One Another

The conflicts between the ego and its environment are not the only ones the mind must overcome.... The more diverse the sense organs are, the more diverse are also the impressions that the organism, the ,,ego," receives from the same point of the external world. But it is not only the senses that become ever more diverse in the course of evolution, but also the organs of movement.... Only such higher kinds of organisms are capable of life in which, along with the organs' division of labour, there also develops a central organ. It combines the impressions the various senses receive from the same object into a unitary image in [the organisms] consciousness. On the other hand, it subjects the different organs of movement to a unitary volitional impulse that brings about their unified cooperation for a common end.... The adaptation, without contradiction, of impressions and movements to one another is, from its beginnings, one of the tasks of the mind, that is, of the central organ of the sensory and motor nerves, of the brain. This task emerges, just as those discussed in the preceding sections, from the nature of the mind as a tool of the organism in the fight for its self-preservation. To the extent that this task remains confined to the functioning of the sensory and motor organs, it is carried out completely instinctively, without the organism becoming conscious of it....